4th ISA Council of National Associations Conference

Sociologies in Dialogue

by invitations only

The Fourth ISA Conference of the Council of National Associations will be held in Taipei, Taiwan, May 8-11, 2017. The theme will be “Sociologies in Dialogue”. Each National Association that is a regular collective member of the ISA is expected to send a representative who is the author or co-author of a paper connected in some way to the theme.

The International Sociological Association has for long called for a global multicultural sociology. The thematic orientations of the previous ISA Conferences of the Council of National Associations were very interested to discuss respectively different traditions of sociology and challenges for sociology in an unequal world, and how to use comparative approaches in order to understand our world in times of turmoil. The fourth round builds on the previous conferences and moves beyond the realm of ideas well into the realm of applications with a focus on how different national and regional sociologies can circulate, exchange, co-construct, and enter into dialogue and controversy.

It will stress the importance of locality, translatability and social embeddedness of knowledge production and has a more democratic global recognition beyond the dominant West. It will tackle broad theoretical/methodological issues that delve through empirical case studies into local knowledge to identify novel strands in theory and methodology with their future epistemic prospects and/or limitations.

While this conference highlights the power structure in knowledge production, it does not consider the relation between the centre and the periphery as one simply of one-way domination. We thus encourage discussing of other approaches that may revolve around concepts such as multicultural sociology, postcolonial global sociology, cosmopolitanism, and multiple modernities.

The conference will also include a focus on internationalization of social science vs its local relevance. With many problems become global, international collaborations become a very important activity in sociological production. Two processes apparently build local engines of globalization.

First is an institutionalization process where 'capacity building' becomes a reality. Through the 'national science' period, scientific research has been closely linked to universities, instead of national public research organizations.

The second process at work, is the building of the national scientific community and this process which relies on whether the political system is willing to disburse for research. Very few of the social scientists are involved in any of the large international scientific debates.

We expect papers to tackle the processes that will tremendously impact on how sociologies enter into global dialogue and mutual learning.

Each National Association that is a regular collective member of the ISA, is expected to send a representative who is the author or co-author of a paper connected in some way to the theme.